Great Expectations: Big Data and Laplace

Scientific determinism as first published by Laplace in 1814 is an important and essential principle in the macro-world around us. We know that if we push something, it will move -- unless our impulse was not sufficient to overcome inertia… and so forth. Laplace postulated that if there were an omniscient daemon who knew the precise positions and impulses of each and every particle in a system, this daemon would be able to deterministically calculate each and every future state of this system. Our beloved spreadsheet calculations resemble this daemon (possibly in more than one connotation). Typing in some basic data to start calculations from, the wonderous spreadsheet software will automagically calulate everything depending on them, eventually deriving the results we wanted to obtain.